Bücher veröffentlicht von Rabbit House Press

Like the holiday staple, this novel is topped with cherries, filled with nuts and fruit, and doused with a healthy dose of spirits. The ghost from Christmas past in this tale is no Marley; he is an incubus freed from hell and chained to a fruitcake that is continually regifted, causing much havoc in the small Southern town of Dixon. This demon, accidentally released, is on the run from an old domestic housekeeper/voodoo root doctor, the eccentric family she nurtured and raised, and a slew of angelic forces, all determined to send him back to hell from whence he came.

Blue Territory is a poetic immersion into the life and art of Joan Mitchell, the great American abstract expressionist painter. A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, she is not as well known as her male counterparts because she was a woman and also because she spent most of her working life in France. Still, in 2013, Bloomsburg Business listed Mitchell as the bestselling female artist of all time. When asked to talk about her paintings, Joan Mitchell often responded, "If I could say it in words, I'd write a book." At once unique and universal, Blue Territory is at its core an exploration of love and life, and what it means to love - and live - what you do. Meticulously researched and lyrically written, it will appeal to anyone interested in passionate engagement with the world. The book eschews images so as to allow the words to form them, thereby freeing the reader to imagine the paintings, much as Mitchell would have to do before picking up her brush.

I have long respected Bruce Lewis as a virtuoso jazz guitarist. A close cousin to Blues, Jazz is dissonant, unstable and like the music he has mastered, the author''s prose follows suit. In the tradition of Thomas Wolfe, Lewis''s words are a cry to the very soil that birthed each character. In lyrical outbursts, Joshua Celeste remembers and is remembered. We are introduced to the characters that make up Joshua''s life from the fields of his boyhood home at Water Maple Farm in Kentucky, with a cattle rancher father and misplaced, glamorous mother to the streets of Budapest, Hungary as a traveling guitarist, a melancholic ex-pat. Bruce Lewis moved to Budapest on May 4th 1993 and stayed until May 22nd, 2012. He played with some of the best European musicians in the world, traveling with his guitar to twelve different countries. His insight into the culture and people of the ancient city make Joshua Fragmented part travelogue and history lesson along with a beautiful, philosophical lesson on the sacrifices of art and the pull of home. This book resembles the dissonance of Jazz as a cast of brilliantly articulated characters sing angular harmonies in the reader''s ear. We hear the passionate railings of his academia-minded brother, Doc and his loyal, sex-obsessed and jealous bandmate, Crip Kovacs right alongside his grandmother Bertha, mother Agnes and the steady stream of women in which Joshua searches for meaning. It is a testament to the lost, nomadic quality of an ever-changing modern world. I am most proud to have a small part in bringing this powerful and original work of fiction to light. - Erin Chandler

"Would that the Roman people had but one neck," said the mad emperor Caligula, "that I might chop it through." In Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, Mike Wilson takes on our own mad would-be emperor, a man "sharpening the hatchet / for our collective suicide." Wilson, a poet of keen intelligence, guides us through this upside-down world where "Antarctica is hotter than L.A." and "all the answers on Jeopardy are lies." Here is the MAGA-hatted, assault-rifle toting cult that drinks, not the Kool-Aid but the Clorox. Here is God the barfly "ordering a round for everyone / but without instructions for an Ark." A government as terrifyingly absurd as Trump''s might seem to defy the poet, but Wilson distils our anger with skill and wit. Arranging deck chairs on the Titanic might be the futile gesture of those who refuse to see impending disaster, but it might also be an assertion of human dignity in the face of madness. - Sherry Chandler